Travel reviews by Mr & Mrs S from Norfolk

"All of the arrangements worked well. I'll comment on each lodge later on but would like to say how impressed we were with MackAir, not only from the plane/info side but how helpful there were as well.

As you may have gathered, I managed to fall off my bike just four days before going. Nothing broken but a lot of bruising on my right side which, even with the max paracetamol and ibuprofen made things a bit painful. Ok when walking on the flat but turning / balancing / going upstairs required a lot of thought to be less painful. The MackAir people as well as the lodges were all very helpful and I was able to do everything ....

As you probably know, Botswana had the 'best' rains in Jan/Feb for 19 years. This was good for them but did mean that the migration of the animals from the interior to more permanent sources of water was much delayed. Chobe for instance was far greener than when we went 12 years ago even though we were there three weeks earlier in 2013. At a guess, we thought that the drying out of the waterholes away from the rivers was perhaps 6+ weeks later than on our previous visit. Curiously, the flood into the delta seemed later than before.

As a result of the changes in weather patterns, we saw far far less animals in Chobe than we were expecting and the density of animals everywhere was lower than expected. On our previous visit when we stayed at Muchenje for 3 nights and Camp Okavango for three nights we almost certainly saw a larger total number of animals than we did in 14 nights this time.

We did manage to see the wild dogs briefly in Savuti but nowhere else. At Splash we heard that the pack was in the adjacent concession at the moment. Our other target, which was cheetah we saw in three places, all lounging under trees/ bushes which we'd seen before. We'd have liked to see them walking or better, hunting.

New species that we did see: Aardwolf - very good sightings at Lagoon, Roan Antelope in Savuti (just one), Brown hyena (Savuti) several birds including a great sighting of a Martial Eagle, Barred Owlet, Pel's Fishing Owl and two bee eaters. After several trips to Africa, we have seen a lot, so less scope for a huge number of new sightings.

We saw a number of new behaviours including quite a clashing of tusks as a Matriarch forced an adolescent male elephant out of the troop; two big hippos fighting wildly, all the hippo 'chattering' at Lagoon; a leopard going up a vertical tree with it's kill (baboon) after recovering it from a hyena who had pinched it..and some new grooming behaviour in baboons. One mock charge from elephants ...

Participants in vehicles: It has been 10 years since we shared game vehicles with others. We don't have a problem sharing but none of the lodges made any attempt to match the group with previous experience of safaris or nature watching in general. Vehicles seemed to be mainly filled with people who arrived at a certain time. At two of the camps we were with people who had been to Africa which was great before but two in particular had people who were notionally interested but spent too much time talking amongst themselves and not listening to the guide. Curious given the cost and how far they had travelled but irritating all the same. Appreciate we could have requested private vehicles at a considerable cost though several camps didn't have the capacity for this. We actually like going around with like minded people, so it was a shame that camps couldn't sort that.

Overall, we found all the booking and arrangements that you dealt with to be great. It turned out that we should have gone maybe two months later - as you may remember the timing was for my birthday last year and when 2024 wasn't possible I should have gone for a later date in 2025.

The trip itself we would rate as on the better side of good rather than fantastic for the reason mentioned above."